Salman Rushdie’s Quichotte and the Post-truth Condition (original) (raw)
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FROM PROTO-NOVEL TO POST-NOVEL: SALMAN RUSHDIE’S QUICHOTTE AS THE REWRITING OF DON QUIXOTE
Motif Akademi Halkbilimi Dergisi, 2024
Salman Rushdie’s 2019 novel Quichotte is the story of a hero reimagined by Rushdie as a 21st century version of Miguel de Cervantes’s Don Quixote. The novel opens in contemporary America where the 70-year-old protagonist Ismail Smile, who goes mad by watching TV, works as a travelling salesman for a pharmaceutical company called Smile Pharmaceuticals. The plot focuses on Ismail’s love for a famous television personality Miss Salma R. who, like Ismail, comes from India. He gets retired, changes his name to Quichotte and goes on a quest to win Salma’s love. The quest turns into a complete replica of Cervantes’s Don Quixote when, on a shooting star, he wishes that he had a son who suddenly appears in the passenger seat of the car he drives. He names him Sancho. Yet, the narration turns out to be a novel in the novel written by a spy novelist referred to only as Brother. Quichotte, therefore, becomes Brother’s imagination that recreates the classical Don Quixote in a contemporary setting. This paper, then, focuses on the concept of post-truth in the metanarrative of Salman Rushdie who not only rewrites a classical novel but also raises questions as to whether or not truths and narrators are reliable. This study also analyses the saturation of the manipulating power of post-truth era in the lives of Rushdie’s characters.
HAL (Le Centre pour la Communication Scientifique Directe), 2020
While at Eton, Rushdie plunged into futuristic science fiction to find an escape route from bullying by classmates in his boarding school. Later, he studied history in Cambridge. After trying to write the postcolonial history of India and Pakistan, and contemporary America at different and crucial moments, in his latest novel Quichotte, Rushdie attempts to take on Cervantes, the very pioneer of the genre of the novel in whose lineage the migrant author wants to be placed by the reader. Situated in post-2001 America with trips to England, the narrative unfolds in an era where "anything can happen," an augmented version of Orwellian reversals. This fictional canvas allows Rushdie to rewrite the history of India, the UK and more significantly, Trump's America, while a glorified nationalist narrative of history is being officially spun in these countries. Indian and American histories are intertwined through the Indo-American diaspora to give the reader a global perspective. The author identifies his ageing self with the dwindling planet and reinvents the fictional pair of Quichotte and Sancho and their quest for love as a potent remedy to the inexorable end of History. My paper attempts to decipher Rushdie's novel with the help of Milan Kundera's theoretical work on the art of the novel and argues that fiction becomes the language in which truth could be told, when lies masquerade as truth.
The focus of the present paper is three dimensional. In the beginning, it critically establishes the foregrounded textual features in the well-known novels of Salman Rushdie which projects him as a unique postmodern fiction writer so far. Then, attention shifts to the in-depth analysis of Quichotte which is a 2019 novel by him written getting motivated by Miguel de Cervantes' classic novel Don Quixote, and it tells the story of an addled Indian American man who travels across America in pursuit of a celebrity television host with whom he has become preoccupied. The protagonist, Sam Du Champ, who is an Indian-born writer living in America and author of a number of unsuccessful spy thrillers writes a book as an bizarre attempt creating the character of Ismail Smile. Then, through a postmodern analysis of the contexts, conventions, intertextuality, language features, metalanguage, modes, and readerly perspective of the narrative, it examines how the narrative discourse addresses the reader; incorporates a story within a story; uses various techniques that emphasize the story's status as a fictional enterprise keeping the reader more engaged; departs from conventional ideas in terms of the form and function of a narrative; and makes the reader draw his or her own conclusions; and thus challenges the assumptions as a metafiction.
Salman Rushdie in the Postmodern Current: New Venues, New Values
2014
The aim of this study is to prove that Rushdie's recent novels are not postcolonial in the sense that they abandon the colonial/colonized binary, the embrace of hybridity, and the theme of undermining the coercion and domination of the colonial country assumed in postcolonial discourse. Instead, his recent fiction is labeled postmodern because it is filled with exuberant postmodern techniques such as historiographic metafiction, the hegemony of mode of productions, the postmodern fragmented self, and suspicions of grand narrative. Furthermore, I will argue that there is an association between Rushdie's postmodern narrative technique (his mixing of history and fantasy) and his political stance when it comes to his notion about America, and that postmodernism enables Rushdie to question the historical "truth" and allows him to rewrite or reconstruct South Asia's history which then sets in motion the western discourse of hegemony. Contrary to commonplace commentaries about his anti-colonialist stance, Rushdie's historical and fictional narrative not only assures the hegemonic discourse of late capitalism but also reflects an imperialist political stance. This will be demonstrated by considering Rushdie's manipulation in his novels of alternate history, cultural modes of production such as commodity fetishism and media, postmodernism or the cultural logic of late capitalism, and historiographic metafiction; furthermore, these features of postmodernism which Rushdie uses in his recent novels indicate his position as a postmodern writer.
'Social Media ha[s] No Memory': Posthuman Identities in Salman Rushdie's Quichotte
Mapping Memory in the Wake of the Posthuman: India, Canada and the World, 2023
Social media engenders an extension of identity, a simulacrum that encompasses and constitutes the notion of the Self. Byung-Chul Han observes how identities reverberate within a narcissistic echo chamber that sustains and simulates a faux sense of authenticity. Social media has permeated and redefined identities, rendering them volatile and precarious. Andrew Hoskins' concept of network memory foregrounds the emergence of digital media that pervades and affects memories. This entails the formation and mediation of memories that are refracted through the digital hyperreality. This paper argues that social media has become a mnemotechnic, and memories are immured within a virtual space that eludes the contours of humanist agency. In this context, the characters in Salman Rushdie's novel Quichotte evoke the notion of destabilised identities, legitimised and affected by virtual spaces. The digital mise en abyme that constructs a subjectivity untethered from its materiality, is symptomatic of a posthumanist entity. This paper would attempt to delineate the pivotal role of social media in fabricating and perpetuating identities through the mediation of digital memories.
The Invention of Truth. Salman Rushdie between Truth and Make-believe.
2023
In this book, the literary world of Salman Rushdie is carefully scrutinised using a ‘metaleptical’ critical approach. Weaving together truth and fiction, reality and fantasy in his novels, the Anglo-Indian author’s work exudes a ‘metamodern’ sensibility as it seamlessly weaves the fabric of real-world experience with the intricate patterns of language and art. Beginning with the contradictions and errors in the narrative of Rushdie’s first masterpiece Midnight’s Children, through the blending of the sacred and the secular in The Satanic Verses, to the palindromic movement of the mutual convergence of life and writing in Quichotte, the volume takes the reader on a journey of discovery of the creative power of language and how it shapes and is shaped by history. Salman Rushdie’s work offers, in fact, the opportunity to engage in a nuanced examination of the balance between historical reality and artistic expression, individual aspirations and collective needs, continuity and decay, truth and make-believe.
Travelling with Quichotte: Reading Rushdie’s Quixotic Reinvention of Cervantes’ Don
RUDN Journal of Studies in Literature and Journalism
Salman Rushdies latest novel Quichotte , inspired by Cervantes Don Quixote , revolves around the journey of a fictional character named Ismail Smile who adopts the name Quichotte as he embarks on a fantastic quest across America to win the heart of celebrated actor and talk-show host Salma R, since his perception of reality has been muddled by incessant immersion in television shows, just as the mind of Cervantes don had been addled by his preoccupation with chivalric romances. While Cervantes protagonist, through his various misadventures, ironically exposed the many maladies of contemporary society, Quichottes journey across America, accompanied by his son Sancho, whom he miraculously imagines into existence, also operates as a picaresque narrative that methodically dissects the alarming aberrations of contemporary world order. Taking Quixotes inability to distinguish between the real and the fictional as his starting point, Rushdies text eclectically foregrounds the menacing fiss...
‘Worlds in Collision’: Salman Rushdie, Globalisation, and Postcoloniality-in-Crisis
The Global Novel and Capitalism in Crisis - Contemporary Literary Narratives , 2020
Pre-publication draft of a chapter from 'The Global Novel and Capitalism in Crisis - Contemporary Literary Narratives' (2020). This chapter maps a transition from the postcolonial disenchantment of Salman Rushdie’s The Moor’s Last Sigh (1995), to the global-American style of The Ground Beneath her Feet (1999) and Fury (2001), and their cosmopolitan mythologizing, geopolitical allegories, and account of American hegemony. It initially examines how The Moor’s Last Sigh rejects the exuberant postcolonial magic realism that characterised Rushdie’s earlier works in favour of a disenchanted realism that focuses on the insufficiency of art to represent Bombay’s globalised criminal capitalism. The section on The Ground Beneath her Feet argues that its deterritorialised rock music mythology embodies the fractures, or irreconcilabilities, of cosmopolitan abstractions of identity and form. The final section on Fury concludes the argument by examining how it operates as a form of fin de siècle ‘world-systemic’ literature that foregrounds the ‘autumnal’ decline of American hegemony through a hyperrealist aesthetics of literary compression and excessive violence.
Salman Rushdie in the Cultural Marketplace
Ashgate, 2013
Taking up the roles that Salman Rushdie himself has assumed as a cultural broker, gatekeeper, and mediator in various spheres of public production, Ana Cristina Mendes situates his work in terms of the contemporary production, circulation, and consumption of postcolonial texts within the workings of the cultural industries. Mendes pays particular attention to Rushdie as a public performer across various creative platforms, not only as a novelist and short story writer, but also as a public intellectual, reviewer, and film critic. Mendes argues that how a postcolonial author becomes personally and professionally enmeshed in the dealings of the cultural industries is of particular relevance at a time when the market is strictly regulated by a few multinational corporations. She contends that marginality should not be construed exclusively as a basis for understanding Rushdie’s work, since a critical grounding in marginality will predictably involve a reproduction of the traditional postcolonial binaries of oppressor/oppressed and colonizer/colonized that the writer subverts. Rather, she seeks to expand existing interpretations of Rushdie’s work, itineraries, and frameworks in order to take into account the actual conditions of postcolonial cultural production and circulation within a marketplace that is global in both orientation and effects.